Quotes About Connection

Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.

We all come from divorce. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it all back together again. What you can do, is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them together. Two things! Not all things.

I have this love for [him]. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his own clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my own forever, and my love goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments

A lifetime's knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it.

Il ne nous suffit pas de comprendre nos obligations à l'égard des autres et de la terre; nous devons aussi les ressentir.

All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude.

Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health—and create profitable diseases and dependences—by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

And yet a knowledge is here that tenses the throat as for song: the inheritance of the ones, alive or once alive, who stand behind the ones I have imagined, who took into their minds the troubles of this place, blights of love and race, but saw a good fate here and willingly paid its cost, kept it the best they could, thought of its good, and mourned the good they lost. (From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179)

For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs.

What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place... nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.

Wendell Berry's formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.

Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me.

I came to see myself as growing out of the earth like the other native animals and plants. I saw my body and my daily motions as brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the place, which would fall back into it like leaves in the autumn.

a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one's bodily life.

There is a use for everyone.

And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are. And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude. I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.

As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.

When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact.

The environment," as we call it, is intimately with us. We're in it. It's in us. But also we are it, and it is us.